1. Field of the Invention
This invention is directed to managing certain operations between an Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) manager and agent running on a Common Management Information Protocol (CMIP) platform. More particularly, the invention relates to multi-phase commit processing of the creation and deletion of managed object instances at an agent by a manager.
2. Description of Prior Art
Manager applications running in a first OSI computing system create and delete objects in an agent application running on a second OSI computing system. The manager application runs on top of a CMIP platform at the first system and, similarly, the agent application runs on top of a CMIP platform at the second system. The create and delete requests from the manager are communicated through the CMIP platform at the first system through a network to the second system and its CMIP platform and, finally, to the agent at the second system. The execution of the creation and deletion requests by the CMIP platform in the second computing system is at a separate program level from the agent application running on the CMIP platform. Accordingly, there is a communication lag between the CMIP platform executing the manager's requests (in this case, create and delete), and the agent whose managed object instances are being created and deleted.
The Managed Object Instances (MOIs) at the agent are performing operations simultaneously that may have overlapping effects on each other. Therefore, creation and deletion requests must be handled between the CMIP platform and agent in the agent's computing system in a manner synchronized with other operations taking place at the MOIs directly or indirectly affected by the creation or deletion of an MOI.
To date, this problem has been dealt with in one of three ways. First, the Managed Object Instances (also referred to simply as managed objects) have been moved into the CMIP platform level of programs in order to eliminate any delay in communication between the CMIP platform and the managed objects. Second, certain simplifying assumptions about the integrity of the managed objects have been made when executing the create and delete requests. Third, the create and delete functions have been moved to the objects rather than being handled by the CMIP platform.
There are several difficulties with the first approach of placing the objects in the CMIP platform. Flexibility is lost in terms of being able to extend and add to the objects, to distribute the objects to different systems, and to be able to add new objects without recompiling the entire platform. The second approach also limits flexibility and, in addition, reduces the power of functions that can be offered with the objects. Object functions that extend the effectiveness of the object to other objects are eliminated. In this way, objects can be deleted and created with no impact on other objects; however, the power and effectiveness of objects is greatly reduced. The difficulty with the third approach is, of course, that the functions transferred onto the objects, including coordinating creation and deletion of objects, load down the processing power of the objects and reduce their performance.